Local officials say they have a word for outsiders who portray the Northern Panhandle as being in free-fall: Wrong.

The Huffington Post recently pegged the Steubenville-Weirton metropolitan area as one of the 10 fastest shrinking in America, while Mother Jones depicted Weirton as “the dark side of the moon.”

Both articles point to the demise of West Virginia's steel industry as catapulting the community and its people into a downward spiral of decay and despair.

Local leaders, however, say the authors of both articles are so intent on telling America how much the Northern Panhandle was hurt by downsizing in the steel industry over the past four decades that that they've overlooked the new jobs, investments and industries that are coming to West Virginia and the Northern Panhandle.

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